The topic of abundance (= plenty, affluence, but also overgrowth, or having more than you need) is a topic that came up as ‘interesting’ a couple of years ago, in a period in my life where the focus was more on the ‘need’ than on the ‘having’. Since then, it amazed me in how prevalent the concept popped up in life. Extreme variety of choices is leading to overkill in society. Where at first glance the word ‘abundance’ may have been loaded with all kinds of positive connotations, at closer examination it turns out to be a mixed bag.

Below I will first apply abundance to customer service, where it helped me explain both some parts of personal efficiency, the demise of Microsoft vs. Apple, the changing business cases in the printer industry, customer choices in general, and the choices Google faces, just like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Customer Service

Personal effectiveness

The most common way that most people are confronted with abundance is through spam, where through unselectiveness of a sender one’s mailbox is crammed with junk. The first lesson I learned in a personal efficiency training was to prevent spam: not just by having a spam filter, but also by stopping subscriptions to newsletters I did not read anyway, informing certain ‘relationships’ that this one-way street thinking was not appreciated at all and others that more consideration on their side on what to send wóuld be. After going through several steps, we ended the course with ensuring that we were pro-actively informed about topics we were interested in instead.

After a while it struck me that this way we were creating the spam of tomorrow: a change in interest would make the information from today the spam of tomorrow. In short, the ‘filter’ (in whichever way) needs to be kept updated. And that is exactly where I see several companies or industries making mistakes.

This also changes the concept of customer service: it is not providing as many kinds of (‘abundant’) services to the customer as possible, but a continuously updated filter to ensure the provision of the right (set of) services. I will leave aside the discussion whether the proper term would be ‘Marketing’, or ‘Sales’. I am talking about the interaction (‘Service’) with an ultimately paying party (‘Customer’).

Example 1:Microsoft

In a similar way, this concept of abundance explains the demise of the market position of Microsoft. When I started my career in Customer Service the battle between Microsoft and Novell was just starting, Bill Gates had just launched his book ‘Business is War’ and WordPerfect was swiped of the face of the earth by MS-Word. Apply was staunchly hanging on to a market share which at a point tumbled below 10%, defending it’s niche but hanging on the edge by it’s fingernails.

Twenty years later we see that the once almighty Microsoft has not made any increase in total stock worth for about 10 years and has been overtaken by Apple in that all-powerful net stock worth measurement. What happened?

Although there are undoubtedly multiple explanations that can be given, each with various reasons and supporting evidence, I would like to focus on the importance of the GUI. This abbreviation of Graphical User Interface only became meaningful to me when I lived in San Francisco about 25 years ago, and my new neighbor turned out to be a free lance GUI-designer working for Apple. My intuitive appreciation for the importance of the GUI was far outshone by the zeal with which my new friend fired away on the intricacies of GUI-design.

Next to the ‘look and feel’ of a GUI (which is a separate, more specialized topic than will be dealt with here) one can see a GUI as the filter on the abundance of functionalities available. Of prime importance is the selection of primary functionalities that is shown on the first screen, of secondary importance is their specific position or ‘the way towards’ the secondary functionalities. Not only is the original (logical or intuitive) positioning relevant, but also the consistency of this positioning in time/versions (ideally also based on similar logic or intuiton). Apple focused on GUI and ultimately excelled in the field by turning Apple-interfaces into a Unique Buying Point.

On the other hand, Microsoft purposefully switched GUI’s with every new release of Windows and Office. Who has not suffered the fate of the frustrated office worker (no pun intended) where she was frantically looking for the location of this particular menu-choice within the new release? Every release, Microsoft confused its customers: by pure market-power it forced us to buy new releases and new training programs since the GUI ‘had been improved’. Which new features were really added in the latest few releases of MS Office? Yes, there are a few, but most of us would have been quite content with skipping an upgrade and working with the older version a few years longer rather than eating the Microsoft ‘foie gras’ force-fed by the IT-department (pun intended). There we also saw the first cracks in the Microsoft hegemony: more and more customers were foregoing upgrades and working with older versions, skipping one upgrade until they were forced to take a next one.

This “War on the customer” was driven by short term financial objectives set in by one of the biggest philanthropists of our time, but not with the interest of the customer in mind. For me it is a ‘great’ example where customer service (by the way, which customer has the telephone number of the Microsoft Customer Service Department?) neglect led not to the demise of a company but to the demise of a reputation and a market position.

Abundance showed its ugly head when the features of the products were so manifold that nobody was interested in them any more. It became a real problem when through the changes in GUI’s users could not find specific functionalities at all. With the benefit of hindsight, I would dare to say that had the users had a chance to keep their GUI of a previous version, Microsoft would have had a better chance of defending it’s market position.

Ultimately there came even an abundance of product versions, which made even any new product launch superfluous.

Example 2:HP Printers

In earlier days I would buy an HP printer because of it’s quality and reliability. To ensure my guaranteed maintenance I would buy HP ink cartridges, even at a higher price.

In the course of time, the business model for printers developed such that printers themselves were put in the market at bargain prices to obtain a large installed base, after which a provider would make it’s money by selling the ink cartridges – with a significantly higher profit margin than the printer itself, of course.

At the same time, the service to printers was reduced and I remember talking to a Service Engineer telling me that it would cost more to repair my printer than to buy a new one. This general consideration made printers ‘abundant’ and significantly reduced my brand loyalty.

The next and for the time being final step was the entrance of abundant ink suppliers into the market, taking advantage of the already installed base of printers of the larger brands and selling their products as straight copies with the exact numbers of A-brands indicated on their packages. The main reason for not switching to these brands would be the idea that these ‘non-original’ inks would be of an inferior quality or that the maintenance on the printer would be compromised. However, since the printers are supplied at bargain basement prices anyway, this reason for the consumer carries no more weight, I would just buy a new one. Even an explosion in different versions of printers could not help the original vendors in confusing competition or the market, a simple numbering system of ink cartridges introduced by themselves also guides the competition.

This market development is growing to the extent that I wonder whether ‘original vendors’ will be ultimately selling any ink at all. By the way, when will an ‘original vendor’ start selling ink for competitors’ machines?

Example 3: Model numbers in general

Even though the number of different products at Apple is increasing as well, compared to other providers it is an amazingly small product portfolio. Take a look at vacuum cleaners, washing machines, telephone sets, printers or any other electronic device, and often it is virtually impossible to keep track of all the versions on the market. Several (copycat) ink providers already indicate that the total number of product versions on their packaging might not be complete. In their rush to segmentation, marketeers have sliced usage up to the extent that the extreme number of choices available is holding customers back in making that choice.

Several retailers have made deals with electronics producers that certain models are produced in two versions: one for the general market and one for them specifically, the only difference being the type number. This way they can claim a lowest price guarantee at no risk: customers confronting a sales person with a lower price for a model B119 elsewhere would be left empty-handed argumentationwise because the retailer carries model B120 instead. That this model has seemingly identical features is just a coincidence, in it’s furthest developed form the B120 would get a new useless feature not in any other model. That would make the claim of ‘lowest price’ at least misleading, as it might be more accurate to state ‘only for sale here’. It will be interesting to watch how long such practices will stand.

Example 4: Google

Thirty years ago, the Yellow Pages were a no-brainer for certain advertising expenditures: it was the dominant search method for finding businesses of various sorts by customers. That the main usage of this product now seems to be as a reference for rip-offs used by scammers to mislead naive advertisers is telling. Some attributed this decline in market position to a change in channels, and that the Yellow Pages were not fast enough to change to the electronic form. I wonder whether that is the whole story: there were electronic forms of the Yellow Pages as well. There was however one main reason why I personally quit using the product, which was that their results were dead wrong! The filters were adjusted so that non-matching-but-paying-advertisers were shown more prominently than matching non-paying advertisers. When looking for a furniture store in Amsterdam one was given a furniture store in Brussels “also delivering in Amsterdam”. The value of the product delivered to the customer was compromised under the pressure of the business model.

We now see the same thing happening with Google. The original search engine would bring up the best match, and a lot of corporate folklore is built on this phenomenon. However, in the course of time and under the financial pressure of the business model, more and more room has been taken up by sponsored results. One example is that in a filter (=’customer service’) with cookies-based information, search results and advertisements are ‘personalized’. There is only one major drawback of this system, which is the effect of advertisers buying space in those filters. Yes, this can be mitigated by having the click-through rate have an effect on whether the advertisement is being shown to the next customers, but it all starts with them being shown to start with.

Here I will leave alone the factor that one can de-activate cookies, since I am not interested in the legal situation that one can avoid it My main interest is in mainstream, the general case. In addition I will not even go into the ever decreasing difference between advertisements and actual search results, which also undermines the authority/reputation of the search engine.

In short, Google runs the risk of sharing the fate of the Yellow Pages: have commercial interests compromise the integrity of the filter that provides the right results to the customer. If this process is not managed properly, neglected customer service will claim it’s next victim.

Example 5: social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

In the early days of social media one’s standing would be determined by the number of followers. Ultimately, this drive led to promiscuity in contacts that would make Casanova proud. This development led to slightly more sophisticated measurements like Klout and Kred. As I have proven before, ( How to gain 800+ followers (+29 Klout) in 5 days) these scores can be – at least partially – bought. Elsewhere has been shown that some extreme number of (mostly deadbeat) followers for some celebrity accounts result from these accounts being suggested to follow to new subscribers.

Another weird fact inn my personal situation is that my Klout score was somewhere in the low 20’s just before a period of inactiveness on social media, when this busy period IRL had ended, my score turned out to be 49, from which it has not moved since, despite a significant increase in activity.

The number of contacts one can follow depends upon various elements, both the activity of those followed, as the time the person spends on following and interaction herself. I dare to say that following more than 1,000 Twitter accounts is limited to those that seem to focus on sending(!) whereas in LinkedIn the number of contacts one can sustainably maintain might be significantly higher.

However, the real abundance in social media is not created by the number of contacts, but by the number and sort of interactions. Where some people might share their whole personal life on social media, the number of updates becomes impossible to follow, especially when automated updates are generated: Foursquare tells your followers where you are, Runtastic tells them how many km you have run and in which time, fllwrs.com informs them on how many contacts (un)followed you in the previous period and more of these ‘items of high interest’. The words of a few parties battling this (see my second blog, in Dutch) were falling on deaf ears.

Social media themselves have not understood this theme of abundance either. Most of them have artificially inflated their user base by avoiding to kick out inactive users (although Facebook now reports ‘active users’ which is at least a transparent and fairly stable definition) in a hypothetical race to be the largest social network, or maybe even more, to show the largest increase in users for their Venture Capitalists, or just for the plain ego-caressing of the Board.

The big danger of this all is that through the abundance of users, contacts or messages, the average value of each of them approaches null. When users have to make decisions on who to follow, a likely ‘unfollow’ will be the fate of those only communicating the agrandizements of their own ego. Or maybe that will be the ultimate kick: “I still have all these followers, despite these automated updates.”

Conclusion

One of the results of today’s affluence – regardless of a crisis left or right – is an incredible choice in products and services that are offered to the customer. This abundance in choices makes it necessary for customer service professionals to help the customer filter the appropriate products for her needs. With this ever increasing abundance, the degree of success in this filter-field will become increasingly important in the battle fields of business. There, Customer Service will determine the difference between ‘abundance’ and overkill.

(Originally published October 10, 2013)